Iván Argote Reimagines the Monument’s Place in Memory

There is a particular weight to permanence, especially when it stands in bronze or stone in the public square. Iván Argote’s exhibition at Dallas Contemporary, curated by Pilar Tompkins Rivas, takes this seeming immovability as its starting point, questioning the very foundations upon which monuments are built and the narratives they are ordained to protect.

The Colombian artist’s practice moves with a philosopher’s precision through questions of memory, power and who decides what a city should remember. Here, across video installations, sculptural works and bas reliefs, Argote constructs an argument not through didacticism but through the marriage of conceptual rigour and a delicate, sometimes darkly comedic touch. A monument, the exhibition suggests, is never merely stone. It is a political act, a colonial inheritance, a statement about whose history matters and whose remains in shadow.

Reimagining the Immovable

To move a monument on a Tuesday morning, as the title proposes with almost bureaucratic understatement, is to imagine the unimaginable. What might shift in our collective understanding if the structures we pass daily without seeing were suddenly elsewhere, or transformed, or allowed to dissolve into something new? Argote’s work holds this question with both intellectual seriousness and a lightness of touch that invites rather than lectures.

The exhibition invites viewers into an active reconsideration of public space itself. It asks not only who deserves commemoration, but whether permanence itself might be a fiction we have agreed upon. In imagining the removal or transformation of monuments, Argote creates conceptual room for alternative narratives to flourish, for histories previously untold to find their own form, for the public square to become a place not of closed historical certainty but of productive, generative possibility.

Through these varied visual languages, the artist balances the weight of historical inquiry with moments of humour and grace, allowing the exhibition to breathe as an invitation rather than an interrogation. It is an act of profound generosity, asking us to think differently about the spaces we inhabit and the stories they tell, without ever leaving us stranded in despair about the past. Instead, Argote offers something more precious: the possibility of reimagining what comes next.

The exhibition remains on view at Dallas Contemporary through 31 January.

Imagery courtesy of Perrotin (@perrotin).